WAVES FROM SYRIA CREATE DELICATE STATE

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Quietly but inexorably, a human tide has crept into Lebanon, Syria's smallest and most vulnerable neighbor.

As Syrian refugees pour over the border, the village priest here, Elian Nasrallah, provides them with medical treatment in his clinic and trudges through muddy fields to deliver blankets. When Christian villagers fret about the flood of Sunni Muslims, he replies that welcoming them is “the real Christianity.”

But the priest and his parishioners cannot keep up. The United Nations counts more than 305,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon, but local officials and aid workers say the real number is about 400,000, saturating the country of 4 million.

The Lebanese government has largely left them to fend for themselves. Deeply divided over Syria, haunted by memories of an explosive refugee crisis a generation ago, it has mostly ignored the problem, dumping it on overwhelmed communities like Qaa.

GROWING SENSE OF EMERGENCY

So far, Lebanon's delicate balance has persevered, but there is a growing sense of emergency.

Sectarian tensions are rising. Fugitive Syrian rebels in border villages have clashed with Lebanese soldiers. The government's anemic response has delayed international aid, and local volunteers are running out of cash and patience.

And the battle for Damascus, the Syrian capital, has barely begun. Should fighting overwhelm that religiously and politically mixed city of 2.5 million people, a half-hour drive from Lebanon, the Lebanese fear a cataclysm that could sweep away their tenuous calm.

In Baalbek, a Hezbollah stronghold where a poster of Syrian President Bashar Assad grins down on a busy street, refugees turn to Sawa, a community group that views helping them as embodying its nonsectarian mission. Still, they rattle Abbas Othman, a Sawa member.

“We are worried they will bring their civil war here,” he said.

It is easy to miss the refugees, until a second glance. Drying laundry peeks from construction sites. Bedsheets hang in shop windows, concealing stark living spaces. Daffodil sellers, shoeshine men, women and children begging in Beirut – all incant, “Min Suria.” From Syria.

Lebanese decision-makers wanted it this way, at first. A year ago, just 5,000 Syrians had fled here, and Hezbollah, Lebanon's most powerful political party, denied any sense of crisis.

The government did not just stand aside, it often undermined aid. Donated supplies went undelivered. Small grants required signatures from the prime minster. During a fierce snowstorm, security forces blocked delivery of tents until a Cabinet member intervened.

“Our government worried too much about politics,” said Emad Shoumari, mayor of a majority-Sunni town, Marj, that has embraced refugees. “This kept the refugees from getting the aid they needed.”

RECOGNITION of THE CRISIS

The government can no longer deny the crisis. Last month, Hezbollah urged Lebanese to welcome refugees regardless of sect or politics. The government reversed course, at least on paper. It approved plans to manage the crisis with help from the United Nations, which awaits funds and permission to build two transit camps, each housing 5,000 refugees, a drop in the bucket.

Syrians and their hosts live edgily together, especially in non-Sunni areas. In the Christian village of Jezzine, 1,600 Syrian refugees outnumber residents.

“We don't know who they are,” said Jezzine's representative in Parliament, Ziad Aswad, a Christian ally of Hezbollah. “They could be al-Qaida.”

Town officials interrogate Syrians about politics and impose a 5 p.m. curfew. Aswad warns that refugees could somehow take over the country: “Goodbye, Lebanon!”

But Abu Haidar, a Syrian Sunni who worked in Jezzine before the uprising, said employers helped him bring his family. He pointed at a bed, a stove and his room's only decoration, a picture of the Virgin Mary. “All this,” he said, “is from the people of Jezzine.”

In Tyre, the southern city where Roman ruins overlook the Mediterranean, Abdulfattah, 30, found safety from battles that ravaged his village in northern Syria. But he keeps his children in his rented room. When he ventures out, he walks with watchful eyes and tense, hunched shoulders.

That is because this is pro-Assad territory. The streets flutter with yellow and green flags for Hezbollah. A short walk away, more than 25 of his relatives live in a two-room shack, awaiting U.N. aid.

Neighbors do not harass him, he said, nor do they offer help. Outside, Abdulfattah, who feared giving a last name, hides his views on the war. Indoors, he relaxed.

“There is pain in every house,” he said. “There is a martyr in every house.”

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